The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Oscar de León was not one of those Dominican cats everybody’s always going on about. He wasn’t no player. Except for one time, he’d never had much luck with women.

He’d been seven then.

It’s true: Oscar was a carajito who was into girls mad young. Always trying to kiss them, always coming up behind them during a merengue, the first nigger to learn the perrito and the one who danced it every chance he got. Because he was a Dominican boy raised in a relatively “normal” Dominican family, his nascent pimpliness was encouraged by family and friends alike. During the parties—and there were many, many parties in those long-ago seventies days, before Washington Heights was Washington Heights, before the Bergenline became a straight shot of Spanish for almost a hundred blocks—some drunk relative inevitably pushed Oscar onto some little girl, and then everyone would howl as boy and girl approximated the hip-motism of the adults.

You should have seen him, his mother sighed. He was our little Porfirio Rubirosa.

He had “girlfriends” early. (Oscar was a stout kid, heading straight to fat, but his mother kept him nice in haircuts, and before the proportions of his head changed he’d had these lovely flashing eyes and these cute-ass cheeks.) The girls—his older sister’s friends, his mother’s friends, even his neighbor, a twenty-something postal employee who wore red on her lips and walked like she had a brass bell for an ass—all fell for him. Ese muchacho está bueno! Once, he’d even had two girlfriends at the same time, his only ménage à trois ever. With Maritza Chacón and Olga Polanca, two girls from his school.

The relationship amounted to Oscar’s standing close to both girls at the bus stop, some undercover hand holding, and some very serious kissing on the lips, first Maritza, then Olga, while the three of them hid behind some bushes. (Look at that little macho, his mother’s friends said. Qué hombre.)

The threesome lasted only a week. One day after school, Maritza cornered Oscar behind the swing set and laid down the law. It’s either her or me! Oscar held Maritza’s hand and talked seriously and at great length about his love for her and suggested that maybe they could all share, but Maritza wasn’t having any of it. Maritza, with her chocolate skin and gray eyes, already expressing the Ogún energy that would chop down obstacles for her the rest of her life. Didn’t take him long to decide: after all, Maritza was beautiful, and Olga was not. His logic as close to the yes/no math of insects as a nigger could get. He broke up with Olga the next day on the playground, Maritza at his side, and how Olga cried! Snots pouring out of her nose and everything! In later years, when he and Olga had both turned into overweight freaks, Oscar could not resist feeling the occasional flash of guilt when he saw Olga loping across a street or staring blankly out near the New York bus stop, wondering how much his cold-as-balls breakup had contributed to her present fuckedupness. (Breaking up with her, he would remember, hadn’t felt like anything; even when she started crying, he hadn’t been moved. He’d said, Don’t be a baby.)

What had hurt, however, was when Maritza dumped him. The Monday after he’d shed Olga, he arrived at the bus stop only to discover beautiful Maritza holding hands with butt-ugly Nelson Pardo. At first Oscar thought it a mistake; the sun was in his eyes, he’d not slept enough the night before. But Maritza wouldn’t even smile at him! Pretended he wasn’t there. We should get married, she was saying to Nelson, and Nelson grinned moronically, turning up the street to look for the bus. Oscar was too hurt to speak; he sat down on the curb and felt something overwhelming surge up from his chest, and before he knew it he was crying, and when his sister Lola walked over and asked him what was the matter he shook his head. Look at the mariconcito, somebody snickered. Somebody else kicked his beloved lunchbox. When he got on the bus, still crying, the driver, a famously reformed PCP addict, said, Christ, what a fucking baby.

Maybe coincidence, maybe selfserving Dominican hyperbole, but it seemed to Oscar that from the moment Maritza dumped him his life shot straight down the tubes. Over the next couple of years he grew fatter and fatter, and early adolescence scrambled his face into nothing you could call cute; he got uncomfortable with himself and no longer went anywhere near the girls, because they always shrieked and called him gordo asqueroso. He forgot the perrito, forgot the pride he felt when the women in the family had called him hombre. He did not kiss another girl for a long, long time. As though everything he had in the girl department had burned up that one fucking week. Olga caught the same bad, no-love karma. She got huge and scary—a troll gene in her somewhere—and started drinking 151 straight out of the bottle and was taken out of school because she had a habit of screaming NATAS! in the middle of homeroom. Sorry, loca, home instruction for you. Even her breasts, when they finally emerged, were huge and scary.

And the lovely Maritza Chacón? Well, as luck would have it, Maritza blew up into the flyest girl in Paterson, New Jersey, one of the queens of New Peru, and, since she and Oscar were neighbors, he saw her plenty, hair as black and lush as a thunderhead, probably the only Peruvian girl on the planet with curly hair (he hadn’t heard of Afro Peruvians yet or of a town called Chincha), body fine enough to make old men forget their infirmities, and from age thirteen steady getting in or out of some roughneck’s ride. (Maritza might not have been good at much—not sports, not school, not work—but she was good at boys.) Oscar would watch Maritza’s getting in and out all through his cheerless, sexless adolescence. The only things that changed in those years were the models of the cars, the size of Maritza’s ass, and the music volting out of the car’s speakers. First freestyle, then Special Ed-era hip-hop, and right at the very end, for just a little while, Hector Lavoe and the boys.

Oscar didn’t imagine that she remembered their kisses but of course he remembered.

THE MORONIC INFERNO

High school was Don Bosco Tech and since Don Bosco Tech was an all-boys Catholic school run by the Salesian Fathers and Brothers and packed with a couple of hundred insecure, hyperactive adolescents it was, for a fat, girl-crazy nigger like Oscar, a source of endless anguish.

Sophomore year Oscar’s weight stabilized at about two-ten (two-twenty when he was depressed, which was often), and it had become clear to everybody, especially his family, that he’d become the neighborhood pariguayo. He wore his semikink hair in a Puerto Rican Afro, had enormous Section-8 glasses (his anti-pussy devices, his boys Al and Miggs called them), sported an unappealing trace of mustache, and possessed a pair of close-set eyes that made him look somewhat retarded. The Eyes of Mingus (a comparison he made himself one day, going through his mother’s record collection; she was the only old-school Dominicana he knew who loved jazz; she’d arrived in the States in the early sixties and shacked up with morenos for years until she met Oscar’s father, who put an end to that particular chapter of the All-African World Party). Throughout high school he did the usual ghettonerd things: he collected comic books, he played role-playing games, he worked at a hardware store to save money for an outdated Apple IIe. He was an introvert who trembled with fear every time gym class rolled around. He watched nerd shows like “Doctor Who” and “Blake’s 7,” could tell you the difference between a Veritech fighter and a Zentraedi battle pod, and he used a lot of huge-sounding nerd words like “indefatigable” and “ubiquitous” when talking to niggers who would barely graduate from high school. He read Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman novels (his favorite character was, of course, Raistlin) and became an early devotee of the End of the World. He devoured every book he could find that dealt with the End Times, from John Christopher’s “Empty World” to Hal Lindsey’s “The Late Great Planet Earth.” He didn’t date no one. Didn’t even come close. Inside, he was a passionate person who fell in love easily and deeply. His affection—that gravitational mass of love, fear, longing, desire, and lust that he directed at any and every girl in the vicinity—roamed across all Paterson, affixed itself everywhere without regard to looks, age, or availability. Despite the fact that he considered his affection this tremendous, sputtering force, it was actually more like a ghost because no girl ever seemed to notice it.

Anywhere else, his triple-zero batting average with the girls might have passed unremarked, but this is a Dominican kid, in a Dominican family. Everybody noticed his lack of game and everybody offered him advice. His tío Rodolfo (only recently released from Rahway State) was especially generous in his tutelage. We wouldn’t want you to turn into one of those Greenwich Village maricones, Tío Rodolfo muttered ominously. You have to grab a muchacha, broder, y méteselo. That will take care of everything. Start with a fea. Coge that fea y méteselo! Rodolfo had four kids with three different women, so the nigger was without doubt the family’s resident metiéndolo expert.

Oscar’s sister Lola (who I’d start dating in college) was a lot more practical. She was one of those tough Jersey Latinas, a girl soccer star who drove her own car, had her own checkbook, called men bitches, and would eat a fat cat in front of you without a speck of vergüenza. When she was in sixth grade, she was raped by an older acquaintance, and surviving that urikán of pain, judgment, and bochinche had stripped her of cowardice. She’d say anything to anybody and she cut her hair short (anathema to late-eighties Jersey Dominicans) partially, I think, because when she’d been little her family had let it grow down past her ass—a source of pride, something I’m sure her rapist noticed and admired.

Oscar, Lola warned repeatedly, you’re going to die a virgin.

Don’t you think I know that? Another five years of this and I’ll bet you somebody tries to name a church after me.

Cut the hair, lose the glasses, exercise. And get rid of those porn magazines. They’re disgusting, they bother Mami, and they’ll never get you a date.

Sound counsel, which he did not adopt. He was one of those niggers who didn’t have any kind of hope. It wouldn’t have been half bad if Paterson and its surrounding precincts had been, like Don Bosco, all male. Paterson, however, was girls the way N.Y.C. was girls. And if that wasn’t guapas enough for you, well, then, head south, and there’d be Newark, Elizabeth, Jersey City, the Oranges, Union City, West New York, Weehawken—an urban swath known to niggers everywhere as Negrapolis One. He wasn’t even safe in his own house; his sister’s girlfriends were always hanging out, and when they were around he didn’t need no Penthouses. Her girls were the sort of hot-as-balls Latinas who dated only weight-lifting morenos or Latino cats with guns in their cribs. (His sister was the anomaly—she dated the same dude all four years of high school, a failed Golden Gloves welterweight who was excruciatingly courteous and fucked her like he was playing connect the dots, a pretty boy she’d eventually dump after he dirty-dicked her with some Pompton Lakes Irish bitch.) His sister’s friends were the Bergen County All-Stars, New Jersey’s very own Ciguapas: primera was Gladys, who complained constantly about her chest being too big; Marisol, who’d end up in M.I.T. and could out-salsa even the Goya dancers; Leticia, just off the boat, half Haitian, half Dominican, that special blend the Dominican government swears no existe_,_ who spoke with the deepest accent, a girl so good she refused to sleep with three consecutive boyfriends! It wouldn’t have been so bad if these girls hadn’t treated Oscar like some deaf-mute harem guard; they blithely went on about the particulars of their sex lives while he sat in the kitchen clutching the latest issue of Dragon. Hey, he would yell, in case you’re wondering, there’s a male unit in here. Where? Marisol would say blandly. I don’t see one.

OSCAR IS BRAVE

Senior year found him bloated, dyspeptic, and, most cruelly, alone in his lack of a girlfriend. His two nerd boys, Al and Miggs, had, in the craziest twist of fortune, both succeeded in landing themselves girls that summer. Nothing special, skanks really, but girls nonetheless. Al had met his at Menlo Park Mall, near the arcade; she’d come on to him, he bragged, and when she informed him, after she sucked his dick, that she had a girlfriend desperate to meet somebody, Al had dragged Miggs away from his Atari and out to a movie, and the rest was, as they say, history. By the end of the week, Miggs had his, too, and only then did Oscar find out about any of it, while they were in his room setting up for another “hair-raising” Champions adventure against the Death-Dealing Destroyers. At first, he didn’t say much. He just rolled his dice over and over. Said, You guys sure got lucky. Guess I’m next. It killed him that they hadn’t thought to include him in their girl heists; he hated Al for inviting Miggs instead of him, and he hated Miggs for getting a girl, period. Al’s getting a girl Oscar could comprehend; Al looked completely normal, and he had a nice gold necklace he wore everywhere. It was Miggs’s girl-getting that astounded him. Miggs was an even bigger freak than Oscar. Acne galore and a retard’s laugh and gray fucking teeth from having been given some medicine too young. What little faith Oscar had in the world took an SS-N-17 Snipe to the head. When, finally, he couldn’t take it no more, he asked pathetically, What, these girls don’t have any other friends?

Al and Miggs traded glances over their character sheets. I don’t think so, dude.

And right there he realized something he’d never known: his fucked-up, comic-book-reading, role-playing, game-loving, no-sports-playing friends were embarrassed by him.

Knocked the architecture right out of his legs. He closed the game early—the Exterminators found the Destroyers’ hideout right away; that was bogus, Al groused as Oscar showed them the door. Locked himself in his room, lay in bed for a couple of stunned hours, then got up, undressed in the bathroom he no longer had to share because his sister was at Rutgers, and examined himself in the mirror. The fat! The miles of stretch marks! The tumescent horribleness of his proportions! He looked straight out of a Daniel Clowes comic book. Like the fat, blackish kid in Beto Hernández’s Palomar.

Jesus Christ, he whispered. I’m a Morlock.

Spent a week looking at himself in the mirror, turned himself every which way, took stock, didn’t flinch, and then he went to Chucho’s and had the barber shave his Puerto Rican ’fro off, lost the mustache, then the glasses, bought contacts, was already trying to stop eating, starving himself dizzy, and the next time Al and Miggs saw him Miggs said, Dude, what’s the matter with you?

Changes, Oscar said pseudo-cryptically.

He, Miggs, and Al were never quite the same friends again. He hung out, saw movies, talked Los Brothers Hernández, Frank Miller, and Alan Moore with them but, over all, he kept his distance. Listened to their messages on the machine and resisted the urge to run over to their places. Didn’t see them but once, twice a week. I’ve been finishing up my first novel, he told them when they asked about his absences.

OSCAR COMES CLOSE

In December, after all his college applications were in (Fairleigh Dickinson, Montclair, Rutgers, Drew, Glassboro State, William Paterson; he also sent an application to N.Y.U., a one-in-a-million shot, and they rejected him so fast he was amazed the shit hadn’t come back Pony Express) and winter was settling its pale, miserable ass across northern New Jersey, Oscar fell in love with a girl in his S.A.T.-prep class. Ana Acuña was a pretty, loudmouthed gordita who read Henry Miller books while she should have been learning to defeat problem sets. Their fifth class, he noticed her reading “Sexus,” and she noticed him noticing and, leaning over, she showed him a passage and he got an erection like a motherfucker.

You must think I’m weird, right? she said, during the break.

You ain’t weird, he said. Believe me—I’m the top expert in the state.

Ana was a talker, had beautiful Caribbean-girl eyes, pure anthracite, and was the sort of heavy that almost every Island nigger dug (and wasn’t shy about her weight, either), and, like every other girl in the neighborhood, wore tight black stirrup pants and the sexiest underwear she could afford. She was a peculiar combination of badmash and little girl—even before he visited her house, he knew there’d be an avalanche of stuffed animals on the bed—and there was something in the ease with which she switched between these two Anas that convinced him that there existed a third Ana, who was otherwise obscure and impossible to know. She’d got into Miller because her ex-boyfriend Manny had given her the books before he joined the Army. She’d been thirteen when they started dating, he’d been twenty-four, a recovering coke addict—Ana talking about these things like they weren’t nothing at all.

You were thirteen and your mother let you date some old-ass nigger?

My parents loved Manny, she said. My mom used to cook dinner for him.

He said, That’s crazy. (And later, at home, he asked his sister, back on winter break, Would you let your thirteen-year-old daughter date some twenty-four-year-old guy? Sure, she snorted, right after they killed me. But they better cut my fucking head off because, believe me, I’d come back from the dead and get them both.)

OSCARand Ana in S.A.T. class, Oscar and Ana in the parking lot afterward, Oscar and Ana at the McDonald’s, Oscar and Ana become friends. Each day, Oscar expected her to be adiós, each day she was still there. They got into the habit of talking on the phone a couple times a week, about nothing, really, spinning words out of their everyday; the first time she called him, offering him a ride to the S.A.T. class; a week later, he called her, just to try it. His heart beating so hard he thought he would die, but all she did was say, Oscar, listen to the bullshit my sister pulled, and off they’d go, building another one of their word-scrapers. By the fifth time he called, he no longer expected the Big Blowoff. She was the first girl outside his family who admitted to having a period, who actually said to him, I’m bleeding like a hog, an astounding confidence that he kept turning over and over in his head. Because her appearance in his life was sudden, because she’d come in under his radar, he didn’t have time to raise his usual wall of nonsense or throw some wild-ass expectations her way. Maybe, after four years of not getting ass, he’d finally found his zone, because amazingly enough, instead of making an idiot of himself as one might have expected, given the hard fact that this was the first girl he’d ever had a conversation with, he actually took it a day at a time. He spoke to her plainly and without effort, and discovered that his sharp, self-deprecating world view pleased her immensely. He would say something obvious and uninspired, and she’d say, Oscar, you’re really fucking smart. When she said, I love men’s hands, he spread both of his across his face and said faux-casual-like, Oh, really? It cracked her up.

Man, she said, I’m glad I got to know you.

And he said, I’m glad I’m me knowing you.

One night while he was listening to New Order and trying to chug through “Clay’s Ark,” his sister knocked on his door. At Rutgers, she’d shaved her head down to the bone, Sinéad style, and now everybody, including their mother, was convinced she was a jota.

You got a visitor, she said.

I do?

Yup. But you might want to clean up some, she warned.

It was Ana. Standing in his foyer, in full-length leather, her trigueña skin blood-charged from the cold, her face gorgeous with eyeliner, mascara, base, lipstick, and blush.

Freezing out, she said. She had her gloves in one hand like a crumpled bouquet.

Hey, was all he managed to say. He knew his sister was upstairs, listening.

What you doing? Ana asked.

Nothing.

Like let’s go to a movie then.

Like O.K., he said.

When he went upstairs to change, his sister was jumping up and down on his bed, low screaming, It’s a date, it’s a date, and she jumped onto his back and nearly toppled him clean through the bedroom window.

So is this some kind of date? he said as he slipped into her car.

She smiled wanly. You could call it that.

Ana drove a Cressida, and instead of taking them to the local theatre she headed down to the Amboy Multiplex. It was so hard for Oscar to believe what was happening that he couldn’t take it seriously. The whole time the movie was on, Oscar kept expecting niggers to jump out with cameras and scream, Surprise! Boy, he said, trying to remain on her map, this is some movie. Ana nodded; she smelled of a perfume, and when she pressed close the heat of her body was vertiginous.

On the ride home, Ana complained about having a headache and they didn’t speak for a long time. He tried to turn on the radio but she said, No, my head’s really killing me. So he sat back and watched the Hess Building and the rest of Woodbridge slide past through a snarl of overpasses. The longer they went without speaking, the more morose he became. It’s just a movie, he told himself. It’s not like it’s a date.

Ana seemed unaccountably sad and she chewed her bottom lip, a real bembe, until most of her lipstick was on her teeth and he was going to make a comment about it, but he decided not to.

I’m reading “Dune,” he said, finally.

She nodded. I hate that book.

They reached the Elizabeth exit, which is what New Jersey is really known for, industrial wastes on both sides of the turnpike, when Ana let loose a scream that threw him against the door.

Elizabeth! she shrieked. Close your fucking legs! Then she looked over at him, threw back her head, and laughed.

When he returned to the house, his sister said, Well?

Well, what?

Did you fuck her?

Jesus, Lola.

Don’t lie to me. I know you Dominican men. She held up her hands and flexed the fingers in playful menace. Son pulpos.

The next day he woke up feeling like he’d been unshackled from his fat, like he’d been washed clean of his misery, and for a long time he couldn’t remember why he felt this way and then finally he said her name. Little did he know that he’d entered into the bane of nerds everywhere: a let’s-be-friends relationship.

In April, Oscar learned he was heading to Rutgers-New Brunswick. You’ll love it, his sister promised him. I know I will, he said. I was meant for college. Ana was on her way to Penn State, honors program, full ride. It was also in April that her ex-boyfriend Manny returned from the Army—Ana told Oscar during one of their trips to Yaohan, the Japanese mall in Edgewater. Manny’s sudden reappearance and Ana’s joy over it shattered the hopes Oscar had cultivated. He’s back, Oscar asked, like forever? Ana nodded. Apparently, Manny had got into trouble again, drugs, but this time, Ana insisted, he’d been set up by these three cocolos, a word he’d never heard her use, so he figured she’d got it from Manny. Poor Manny, she said.

Yeah, poor Manny, Oscar muttered.

Poor Manny, poor Ana, poor Oscar. Things changed quickly. First, Ana stopped being home all the time, and Oscar found himself stacking messages on her machine: This is Oscar, a bear is chewing my legs off, please call me. This is Oscar, they want a million dollars or it’s over, please call me. She always got back to him after a couple of days and was pleasant about it, but still. Then she cancelled three Fridays in a row, and he had to settle for the clearly reduced berth of Sunday after church. She picked him up, and they drove out to Boulevard East and parked the car, and together they stared out at the Manhattan skyline. It wasn’t an ocean, or a mountain range; it was, at least to Oscar, better.

On one of these little trips, she let slip, God, I’d forgotten how big Manny’s cock is.

Like I really need to hear that, Oscar snapped.

I’m sorry, she said hesitantly. I thought we could talk about everything.

Well, it actually wouldn’t be bad if you kept Manny’s anatomical enormity to yourself.

With Manny and his big cock around, Oscar began dreaming about nuclear annihilation, how through some miracle he was first to hear about a planned attack, and without pausing to think he stole his tío’s car, drove it to the store, stocked it full of supplies (shooting a couple of looters on the way), and then fetched Ana. What about Manny? she wailed. There’s no time! he’d insisted, peeling out. When he was in a better mood, he let Ana discover Manny, who would be hanging from a light fixture in his apartment, his tongue bulbous in his mouth. The news of the imminent attack on the TV, a note pinned to his chest. I koona taek it. And then Oscar would comfort Ana and say something like, He was too weak for this hard new world.

Oscar even got—joy of joys!—the opportunity to meet the famous Manny, which was about as much fun as being called a fag during a school assembly (which had happened). Met him outside Ana’s house. He was this intense emaciated guy with voracious eyes.

When they shook hands, Oscar was sure the nigger was going to smack him; he acted so surly. Manny was muy bald and completely shaved his head to hide it, had a hoop in each ear, and this leathery out-in-the-sun look of an old cat straining for youth.

So you’re Ana’s little friend, Manny said derisively.

That’s me, Oscar said in a voice so full of cheerful innocuousness that he could have shot himself for it.

He snorted. I hope you ain’t trying to chisel in on my girl.

Oscar said, Ha-ha. Ana flushed red, looked at the ground.

With Manny around, Oscar was exposed to an entirely new side of Ana. All they talked about now, the few times they saw each other, was Manny and the terrible things he did to her. Manny smacked her, Manny kicked her, Manny called her a fat twat, Manny cheated on her, she was sure, with this Cuban chickie from the middle school. They couldn’t talk ten minutes without Manny beeping her and her having to call him back and assure him she wasn’t with anybody else.

What am I going to do? she asked over and over, and Oscar always found himself holding her awkwardly and telling her, Well, I think if he’s this bad you should break up with him, but she shook her head and said, I know I should, but I can’t. I love him.

Oscar liked to kid himself that it was only cold, anthropological interest that kept him around to see how it would all end, but the truth was he couldn’t extricate himself. He was totally and irrevocably in love with Ana. What he used to feel for those girls he’d never really known was nothing compared with the amor he was carrying in his heart for Ana. It had the density of a dwarf motherfucking star and at times he was a hundred per cent sure it would drive him mad. Every Dominican family has stories about niggers who take love too far, and Oscar was beginning to suspect that they’d be telling one of these stories about him real soon.

Miraculous things started happening. Once, he blacked out while crossing an intersection. Another time, Miggs was goofing on him, talking smack, and for the first time ever Oscar lost his temper and swung on the nigger, connected so hard that homeboy’s mouth spouted blood. Jesus Christ, Al said. Calm down! I didn’t mean to do it, Oscar said unconvincingly. It was an accident. Mudafuffer, Miggs said. Mudafuffer! Oscar got so bad that one desperate night, after listening to Ana sobbing to him on the phone about Manny’s latest bullshit, he said, I have to go to church now, and put down the phone, went to his tío’s room and stole his antique Dragoon pistol, that oh-so-famous First Nation exterminating Colt .44, stuck its impressive snout down the front of his pants, and proceeded to stand in front of Manny’s apartment. Come on, motherfucker, he said calmly. I got a nice eleven-year-old girl for you. He didn’t care that he would more than likely be put away forever and that niggers like him got ass- and mouth-raped in jail, or that if the cops picked him up and found the gun they’d send his tío’s ass up the river for parole violation. He didn’t care about jack. His head contained nothing, it felt like it had been excavated, a perfect vacuum.

Folks started noticing that he was losing it. His mother, his tío, even Al and Miggs, not known for their solicitude, were like, Dude, what the fuck’s the matter with you?

After he went on his third Manny hunt, he broke down and confessed to his sister, and she got them both on their knees in front of the altar she’d built to their dead abuela and had him swear on their mother’s soul that he’d never pull anything like that again as long as he lived. She even cried, she was so worried about him.

You need to stop this, Mister.

I know I do, he said. But it’s hard.

That night, he and his sister both fell asleep on the couch, she first. Her shins were covered in bruises. Before he joined her, he decided that this would be the end of it. He would tell Ana how he felt, and if she didn’t come away with him then he wouldn’t speak to her ever again.

They met at the Yaohan mall. Ordered two chicken-katsu curries and then sat in the large cafeteria with the view of Manhattan, the only gaijin in the whole joint.

He could tell by Ana’s clothes that she had other plans that night. She was in a pair of black leather pants and had on one of those fuzzy light-pink sweaters that girls with nice chests can rock forever. Her face was so swollen from recent crying it looked like she was on cortisone.

You have beautiful breasts, he said as an opener.

Confusion, alarm. Oscar! What’s the matter with you?

He looked out through the glass at Manhattan’s western flank, looked out like he was some deep nigger. Then he told her.

There were no surprises. Her eyes went soft, she put a hand on his hand, her chair scraped closer, there was a strand of yellow in her teeth. Oscar, she said gently, I have a boyfriend.

So you don’t love me?

Oscar. She breathed deep. I love you as a friend.

She drove him home; at the house, he thanked her for her time, walked inside, lay in bed. They didn’t speak again.

In June, he graduated from Don Bosco. He heard in passing that, of everybody in their section of P-town, only he and Olga, poor, fucked-up Olga, had not attended even one prom. Dude, Miggs joked, maybe you should have asked her out.

He spent the summer working at the hardware store. Had so much time on his hands he started writing a novel for real. In September, he headed to Rutgers, and quickly buried himself in what amounted to the college version of what he’d majored in throughout high school: getting no ass. Despite swearing to be different, he went back to his nerdy ways, eating, not exercising, using flash words, and after a couple consecutive Fridays alone he joined the university’s resident geek organization, R.U. Gamers.

SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION

The first time I met Oscar was at Rutgers. We were roommates our sophomore year, cramped up in Demarest, the university’s official homo dorm, because Oscar wanted to be a writer and because I’d pulled the last number in the housing lottery. You never met more opposite niggers in your life. He was a dork, totally into Dungeons & Dragons and comic books; he had like a billion science-fiction paperbacks, all in his closet; and me, I was into girls, weight lifting, and Danocrine. (What is it with us niggers and our bodies? Not even Fanon can explain it to me.) I had this beautiful Irish-Puerto Rican girlfriend, a Plainfield girl I couldn’t get enough of, a firefighter’s daughter who didn’t speak a word of Spanish, and I was into clubs like a motherfucker—Illusions, Foxes, Mercedes and Mink (on Springfield Ave. in Newark, the only club on the planet with a Ghettogirl Appreciation Night). Those were the Boricua Posse days, and I never got home before six in the morning, so mostly what I saw of Oscar was a big, dormant hump crashed out under a sheet. When we were in the dorm together, he was either working on his novel or talking on the phone to his sister, who I’d seen a few times at Douglass. (I’d tried to put a couple of words on her because she was no joke in the body department, but she cold-crumbed me.) Those first months, me and my boys ragged on Oscar a lot—I mean, he was a nerd, wasn’t he?—and right before Halloween I told him he looked like that fat homo Oscar Wilde, which was bad news for him, because then all of us started calling him Oscar Wao. The sad part? After a couple of weeks, he started answering to it.

Besides me fucking with him, we never had no problems; he never got mad at me when I said shit, just sat there with a hurt stupid smile on his face. Made a brother feel kinda bad, and after the others left I would say, You know I was just kidding, right? By second semester, I even started to like the kid a little. Wasn’t it Turgenev who said, Whom you laugh at you forgive and come near to loving? I didn’t invite him out to no clubs, but we did start going to Brower Commons to eat, even checked out an occasional movie. We talked a little, mostly about girls, comic books, and our corny whiteboy neighbors who were pussy asshole cocksuckers. Girls, though, were point zero; they were the world to Oscar. I mean, they were the world to me, too, but with him it was on some next shit. He got around a cute one and the nigger would almost start shaking. Easy to understand; our first month as roommates, he’d told me he’d never kissed one! Never! Jesus fucking Christ! The horror! It wasn’t like I couldn’t sympathize, but I didn’t think acting like a nut around the mamacitas was going to help his case. I tried to give him advice—first off, cristiano, you have to stop gunning on the superbabes—but he wouldn’t listen. He said, Nothing else works, I might as well make a fool out of myself.

It wasn’t until the middle of spring semester that I ever saw Oscar really in love. Catalyn Sangre de Toro Luperón. Catalyn was this Puerto Rican Goth girl—in 1990, niggers were having trouble wrapping their heads around Goths, period, but a Puerto Rican Goth, that was as strange to us as a black Nazi. Anyway, Catalyn was her real name, but her around-the-cauldron name was La Jablesse. You think I’m kidding? Every standard a brother like me had, this girl short-circuited. Her hair she wore in this black Egypto cut, her eyes caked with eyeliner and mascara, her lips painted black, a Navajo tattoo across her whole back, and none of it mattered, because homegirl was luminous. She had no waist, big perfect tits, wore black spiderweb clothes, and her accent in Spanish and English was puro Guayama. Even I had been hot for Catalyn, but the one time I’d tried to mack her at the Douglass Library she picked up her books and moved to another table, and when I tried to come over to apologize she did it again.

Ice.

So: one day I caught Oscar talking to La Jablesse in Brower, and I had to watch, because I figured if I got roasted she was going to vaporize his ass. Of course, he was full on, and homegirl was holding her tray and looking at him askance, like, What the fuck does this freak want? She started walking away, and Oscar yelled out, We’ll talk later, O.K.? And she shot back a Sure, all larded with sarcasm.

You have to give it to Oscar. He didn’t let up. He just kept hitting on her with absolutely no regard for self or dignity, and eventually she must have decided he was harmless, because she started treating him civil. Soon enough, I saw them walking together down College Avenue. One day, I came home from classes and found La Jablesse sitting on my bed, Oscar sitting on his. I was speechless. She remembered me. You can always tell. She said, You want me to get off your bed? I said, Nah, picked up my gym bag, and ran out of there like a pussy. When I got back from the weight room, Oscar was on his computer. On page one billion of his novel.

I said, What’s up with you and Miss Scarypants?

Nothing much. Then he smiled and I knew he’d heard about my lame-ass pickup attempt.

I was one sore loser; I said, Well, good luck, Wao. I just hope she doesn’t sacrifice you to Beelzebub or anything.

Later, the two of them started going to movies together. Some narratives never die. She was the first person to get him to try mushrooms, and once, right at the end, when he was starting to talk about her like she was the Queen of Everything, she took him to her room, turned off the lights, lit some witchy candles, and danced for him.

What the hell was this girl thinking?

In less than a week, Oscar was in bed crying, and La Jablesse had a restraining order on his ass. Turns out Oscar walked in on Catalyn while she was “entertaining” some Goth kid, caught them both naked, probably covered with blood or something, and he berserked. Started tearing her place up, and Gothdude jumped butt-naked out the window. Same night, I found Oscar on his top bunk, bare-chested, the night he said, I fucked up real bad, Yunior.

He had to attend counselling, to keep from losing his housing, but now everybody in the dorm thought he was some kind of major psycho. This is how our year together ended. Him at his computer, typing, me being asked in the hall how I liked dorming with Mr. Crazyman.

Would probably never have chilled with him again, but then, a year later, I started speaking to his sister, Lola de León. Femme-matador. The sort of girlfriend God gives you young, so you’ll know loss the rest of your life. The head of every black and brown women’s progressive organization at Douglass, beloved Phi Chi hermana, blah, blah, blah. She didn’t have no kind of tact and talked too much for my taste, but, man, could she move, and her smile was enough to pull you across a room. I began noticing every time she was around, it was like she was on a high wire; I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. I asked my boys what they thought about her and they laughed, said, Yo, she looks like a slave. Never forgave any of them for that.

Our first night together was at her place on Commercial Ave., and before I put my face between her legs she dragged me up by my ears. Why is this the face I cannot forget? Tired from finals, swollen from kissing. She said, Don’t ever cheat on me.

I won’t, I promised her. Don’t laugh. My intentions were good.

We were still together at graduation, and we took pictures with each other’s families—there’s even a couple of me and Oscar. We look like a couple of circus freaks: I’m muscle-bound, hands as big as hams, and Oscar’s heavy, squinting into the camera like we just pulled him out of a trunk and he doesn’t know where the fuck he is.

THE DARK AGE

After college, Oscar moved back home. Left a virgin, returned one. Took down his childhood posters (Star Blazers, Captain Harlock) and tacked up his college ones (Akira and Terminator II). These were the early Bush years, the economy still sucked, and he kicked around doing nada for almost seven months until he started substituting at Don Bosco. A year later, the substituting turned into a full-time job. He could have refused, could have made a “saving throw” versus Death Magic, but instead he went with the flow. Watched his horizons collapse, told himself it didn’t matter.

Had Don Bosco, since last we visited, been miraculously transformed by the spirit of Christian brotherhood? Had the eternal benevolence of the Lord cleansed the students of their bile? Negro, please. The only change that Oscar saw was in the older brothers, who all seemed to have acquired the inbred Innsmouth “look”; everything else (like white arrogance and the self-hate of people of color) was the same, and a familiar gleeful sadism still electrified the halls. Oscar wasn’t great at teaching, his heart wasn’t in it, and boys of all grades and dispositions shitted on him effusively. Students laughed when they spotted him in the halls. Pretended to hide their sandwiches. Asked in the middle of lectures if he ever got laid, and no matter how he responded they guffawed mercilessly. How demoralizing was that? And every day he found himself watching the “cool” kids torture the crap out of the fat, the ugly, the smart, the poor, the dark, the black, the unpopular, the African, the Indian, the Arab, the immigrant, the strange, the femenino, the gay—and in every one of these clashes he must have been seeing himself. Sometimes he tried to reach out to the school’s whipping boys—You ain’t alone, you know?—but the last thing a freak wants is a helping hand from another freak. In a burst of enthusiasm, he attempted to start a science-fiction club, and for two Thursdays in a row he sat in his classroom after school, his favorite books laid out in an attractive pattern, listened to the roar of receding footsteps in the halls, the occasional shout outside his door of Beam me up! and Nanoo-Nanoo! Then, after thirty minutes, he collected his books, locked the room, and walked down those same halls, alone, his footsteps sounding strangely dainty.

Social life? He didn’t have one. Once a week he drove out to Woodbridge Mall and stared at the toothpick-thin black girl who worked at the Friendly’s, who he was in love with but to whom he would never speak.

At least at Rutgers there’d been multitudes and an institutional pretense that allowed a mutant like him to approach without causing a panic. In the real world, girls turned away in disgust when he walked past. Changed seats at the cinema, and one woman on the crosstown bus even told him to stop thinking about her. I know what you’re up to, she hissed. So stop it.

I’m a permanent bachelor, he told his sister.

There’s nothing permanent in the world, his sister said tersely.

He pushed his fist into his eye. There is in me.

The home life? Didn’t kill him, but didn’t sustain him, either. His moms, smaller, rounder, less afflicted by the suffering of her youth, still the work golem, still sold second-rate clothes out of the back of her house, still allowed her Peruvian boarders to pack as many relatives as they wanted into the first floors. And Tío Rodolfo, Fofo to his friends, had reverted back to some of his hard pre-prison habits. He was on the caballo again, broke into lightning sweats at dinner, had moved into Lola’s room, and now Oscar got to listen to him chicken-boning his stripper girlfriends almost every single night. Hey, Tío, he yelled out, try to use the headboard a little less.

Oscar knew what he was turning into, the worst kind of human on the planet: an old, bitter dork. He was depressed for long periods of time. The Darkness. Some mornings, he would wake up and not be able to get out of bed. Had dreams that he was wandering around the evil planet Gordo, searching for parts for his crashed rocket ship, but all he encountered were burned-out ruins. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, he said to his sister over the phone. He threw students out of class for breathing, told his mother to fuck off, went into his tío’s closet and put the Colt up between his eyes, then lay in bed and thought about his mother fixing him his plate for the rest of his life. (He heard her say into the phone when she thought he wasn’t around, I don’t care, I’m happy he’s here.)

Afterward—when he no longer felt like a whipped dog inside, when he could go to work without wanting to cry—he suffered from overwhelming feelings of guilt. He would apologize to his mother. He would take the car and visit Lola. She lived in the city now, was letting her hair grow, had been pregnant once, a real moment of excitement, but she aborted it because I was cheating on her with a neighbor. (Our only baby.) He went on long rides. He drove as far as Amish country, would eat alone at a roadside diner, eye the Amish girls, imagine himself in a preacher suit, sleep in the back of the car, and then drive home.

OSCAR TAKES A VACATION

When Oscar had been at Don Bosco nearly three years, his moms asked him what plans he had for the summer. Every year, the family spent the better part of June, July, and August in Santo Domingo; Oscar hadn’t accompanied them since Abuela had screamed out Haitians! once and died.

It’s strange. If he’d said no, nigger would probably still be alive. But this ain’t no Marvel Comics “What if?”—this ain’t about stupid speculation, and time, as they say, is growing short. That May, Oscar was, for once, in better spirits. A couple of months earlier, after a particularly nasty bout with the Darkness, he’d started another one of his diets and combined it with long, lumbering walks around the neighborhood, and guess what? The nigger stuck with it and lost close on twenty pounds! A milagro! He’d finally repaired his ion drive; the evil planet Gordo was pulling him back but his fifties-style rocket, the Hijo de Sacrificio, wouldn’t quit. Behold our cosmic explorer: eyes wide, lashed to his acceleration couch, his hand over his mutant heart.

He wasn’t svelte by any stretch of the imagination, but he wasn’t Joseph Conrad’s wife no more, either. Earlier in the month, he’d even spoken to a bespectacled black girl on a bus, said, So, you’re into photosynthesis, and she’d actually lowered her issue of Cell and said, Yes, I am. So what if he hadn’t ever got past Earth Sciences and hadn’t been able to convert that slight communication into a phone number or a date? Homeboy was, for the first time in ten years, feeling resurgent; nothing seemed to bother him, not his students, not the fact that “Doctor Who” had gone off the air, not his loneliness; he felt insuperable, and summers in Santo Domingo . . . Well, Santo Domingo summers have their own particular allure. For two months, Santo Domingo slaps the diaspora engine into reverse, yanks back as many of its expelled children as it can; airports choke with the overdressed; necks and luggage carrousels groan under the accumulated weight of that year’s cadenas and paquetes; restaurants, bars, clubs, theatres, malecones, beaches, resorts, hotels, moteles, extra rooms, barrios, colonias, campos, ingenios swarm with quisqueyanos from the world over: from Washington Heights to Roma, from Perth Amboy to Tokyo, from Brijeporr to Amsterdam, from Anchorage to San Juan; it’s one big party; one big party for everybody but the poor, the dark, the jobless, the sick, the Haitian, their children, the bateyes, the kids whom certain Canadian, American, German, and Italian tourists love to rape—yes, sir, nothing like a Santo Domingo summer, and so for the first time in years Oscar said, My elder spirits have been talking to me, Ma. I think I might go. He was imagining himself in the middle of all that ass-getting, imagining himself in love with an Island girl. (A brother can’t be wrong forever, can he?)

So curious a change in policy was this that even Lola quizzed him about it. You never go to Santo Domingo.

He shrugged. I guess I want to try something new.

RETURN TO A NATIVE LAND

Family de León flew down to the capital on the fourteenth of June. (Oscar told his bosses, My aunt got eaten by a shark, it’s horrible, so he could bail out of work early. His mother couldn’t believe it. You lied to a priest?)

In the pictures Lola brought home—she had to leave early; her job gave her only two weeks and she’d already killed off all her aunts—there are shots of Oscar in the back of the house reading Octavia Butler, shots of Oscar on the Malecón with a bottle of Presidente in his hand, shots of Oscar at the Columbus lighthouse, where half of Villa Duarte used to stand, shots of Oscar in Villa Juana buying spark plugs, shots of Oscar trying on a hat on the Conde, shots of Oscar standing next to a burro. You can tell he’s trying. He’s smiling a lot, despite the bafflement in his eyes.

He’s also, you might notice, not wearing his fat-guy coat.

OSCAR MEETS A BABE

After his initial two weeks on the Island, after he’d got somewhat used to the scorching weather and the surprise of waking up in another country, after he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves, the whisper that says You Do Not Belong, after he’d gone to about ten clubs and, because he couldn’t dance salsa or merengue or bachata, had sat and drunk his Presidentes while Lola and his cousins burned holes in the floor, after he’d explained to people a hundred times that he’d been separated from his sister at birth, after he spent a couple of quiet mornings on his own on the Malecón, after he’d given out all his taxi money to beggars and had to call his cousin to get home, after he’d watched shirtless, shoeless seven-year-olds fighting each other for the scraps he’d left on his plate at an outdoor café, after the family visited the shack in Baitoa where his moms had been born, after he had taken a dump in a latrine and wiped his ass with a corncob, after he’d got somewhat used to the surreal whirligig that was life in the capital—the guaguas, the cops, the mind-boggling poverty, the Dunkin’ Donuts, the beggars, the Pizza Huts, the tígueres selling newspapers at the intersections, the snarl of streets and shacks that were the barrios, the masses of niggers he waded through every day and who ran him over if he stood still, the mind-boggling poverty, the skinny watchmen standing in front of stores with their shotguns, the music, the raunchy jokes heard on the streets, the Friday-night strolls down the Avenida, the mind-boggling poverty—after he’d gone to Boca Chica and Villa Mella, after the relatives berated him for having stayed away so long, after he heard the stories about his father and his mother, after he stopped marvelling at the amount of political propaganda plastered up on every spare wall, after the touched-in-the-head tío who’d been tortured during Balaguer’s reign came over and cried, after he’d swum in the Caribbean, after Tío Rodolfo had got the clap from a puta (Man, his tío cracked, what a pisser! Har-har!), after he’d seen his first Haitians kicked off a guagua because niggers claimed they “smelled,” after he’d nearly gone nuts over all the bellezas he saw, after all the gifts they’d brought had been properly distributed, after he’d brought flowers to his abuela’s grave, after he had diarrhea so bad his mouth watered before each detonation, after he’d visited all the rinky-dink museums in the capital, after he stopped being dismayed that everybody called him gordo, after he’d been overcharged for almost everything he wanted to buy, after the terror and joy of his return subsided, after he settled down in his abuela’s house, the house that the diaspora had built, and resigned himself to a long, dull, quiet summer, after his fantasy of an Island girlfriend caught a quick dicko (who the fuck had he been kidding? he couldn’t dance, he didn’t have loot, he didn’t dress, he wasn’t confident, he wasn’t handsome, he wasn’t from Europe, he wasn’t fucking no Island girl), after Lola flew back to the States, Oscar fell in love with a semiretired puta.

Her name was Yvón Pimentel. Oscar considered her the start of his real life. (She was the end of it, too.)

She lived two houses over and was a newcomer to Mirador Norte. She was one of those golden mulatas that French-speaking Caribbeans call “chabines,” that my boys call chicas de oro; she had snarled apocalyptic hair, amber eyes, and was one white-skinned relative away from jabao.

At first Oscar thought she was only a visitor, this tiny, slightly paunchy babe who was always high-heeling it out to her Pathfinder. (She didn’t have the Mirador Norte wanna-be American look.) The two times Oscar bumped into her at the local café she smiled at him and he smiled at her. The second time—here, folks, is where the miracles begin—she sat at his table and chatted him up. At first he didn’t know what was happening and then he realized, Holy shit! A girl was rapping to him. Turned out Yvón had known his abuela, even attended her funeral. You I don’t remember. I was little, he said defensively. And, besides, that was before the war changed me.

She didn’t laugh. That’s probably what it is. You were a boy. On went the shades, up went the ass, out went the girl, Oscar’s erection following her like a dowser’s wand.

Yvón had attended the U.A.S.D. a long time ago, but she was no college girl. She had lines around her eyes and seemed, to Oscar at least, mad open, mad worldly, and had the sort of intense zipper gravity that hot middle-aged women exude effortlessly. The next time he ran into her, in front of her house (he had watched for her), she screamed, Oscar, querido! Invited him into her near-empty casa—Haven’t had the time to move in yet, she said offhandedly—and because there wasn’t any furniture besides a kitchen table, a chair, a bureau, a bed, and a TV, they had to sit on the bed. (Oscar peeped at the astrology books under the bed and the complete collection of Paulo Coelho’s novels. She followed his gaze and said with a smile, Paulo Coelho saved my life.) She gave him a beer, had a double Scotch, then for the next six hours regaled him with tales from her life. It wasn’t until midway through their chat that it hit Oscar that the job she talked so profusely about was prostitution. It was Holy shit! the Sequel. Even though putas were one of Santo Domingo’s premier exports, Oscar had never been near one in his entire life.

Yvón was an odd, odd bird. She was talkative, the sort of easygoing woman a brother can relax around, but there was also something slightly detached about her, as though (Oscar’s words now) she were some marooned alien princess who existed partially in another dimension. She was the sort of woman who, cool as she was, slipped out of your head a little too quickly, a quality she recognized and was thankful for, as though she relished the short bursts of attention she provoked from niggers, but didn’t want anything sustained. She didn’t seem to mind being the girl you called every couple of months at eleven at night, just to see what she was up to. As much relationship as she could handle.

Her Jedi mind tricks did not, however, work on Oscar. When it came to girls, the brother had a mind like a four-hundred-year-old yogi. He latched on and stayed latched. By the time he left her house that night and walked home through the Island’s million attack mosquitoes, he was lost. He was head over heels. (Did it matter that Yvón started mixing Italian in with her Spanish after her fourth drink or that she almost fell flat on her face when she showed him out? Of course not!) He was in love.

His mother met him at the door and couldn’t believe his sinvergüencería. Do you know that woman’s a PUTA? Do you know she bought that house CULEANDO?

He shot back, Do you know her mother was a DOCTOR? Do you know her father was a JUDGE?

The next day at one, Oscar pulled on a clean chacabana and strolled over to her house. (Well, he sort of trotted.) A red Jeep was parked outside, nose to nose with her Pathfinder. A Policía Nacional plate. And felt like a stooge. Of course she had boyfriends. His optimism, that swollen red giant, collapsed down to a bone-crushing point of gloom. Didn’t stop him coming back the next day, but no one was home, and by the time he saw her again three days later he was convinced that she had warped back to whatever Forerunner world had spawned her. Where were you? he said, trying not to sound as miserable as he felt. I thought maybe you fell in the tub or something. I thought maybe you’d got amnesia.

She smiled and gave her ass a little shiver. I was making the patria strong, mi amor.

He had caught her in front of the TV, doing aerobics in a pair of sweatpants and what might have been described as a halter top. It was hard for him not to stare at her body. When she first let him in she’d screamed, Oscar, querido! Come in! Come in!

I know what niggers are going to say. Look, he’s writing Suburban Tropical now. A puta and she’s not an underage, snort-addicted mess? Not believable. Should I go down to the Feria and pick me up a more representative model? Would it be better if I turned Yvón into Jahyra, a friend and a neighbor in Villa Juana, who still lives in one of those old-style pink wooden houses with a tin roof? Jahyra—your quintessential Caribbean puta, half cute, half not—who’d left home at the age of fifteen and lived in Curaçao, Madrid, Amsterdam, and Rome, has two kids and a breast job bigger than Luba’s in “Love and Rockets,” and who claimed, proudly, that her aparato had paved half the streets in her mother’s home town. Or would it be better if I had Oscar meet Yvón at the World Famous Lavacaro, the carwash where a brother can get his head and his fenders polished (talk about convenience!). Would this be better?

But then I’d be lying. This is a true account of the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Can’t we believe that an Yvón can exist and that a brother like Oscar might be due a little luck after twenty-three years?

This is your chance. If yes, continue. If no, return to the Matrix.

THE GIRL FROM SABANA IGLESIA

In their photos, Yvón looks young. It’s her smile and the way she perks up her body for every shot as if she’s presenting herself to the world, as if she’s saying, ta-da, here I am, take it or leave it. It doesn’t hurt that she’s barely five feet tall or that she doesn’t weigh nothing. She dressed young, too, but she was a solid thirty-six, a perfect age for anybody but a puta. In the closeups, you can see the crow’s-feet, and the little belly she complains all the time about, and the way her breasts and her ass are starting to lose their swell, which was why, she said, she had to be in the gym five days a week. When you’re sixteen, a body like this is free; when you’re forty—pffft!—it’s a full-time occupation. The third time Oscar came over, Yvón doubled up on the Scotches again and then took down her photo albums from the closet and showed him all the pictures of herself when she was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, always on a beach, always in an eighties bikini, always smiling, always with her arms around some middle-aged eighties yakub. Looking at those old hairy blancos, Oscar couldn’t help but feel hopeful. Each photo had a date and a place at the bottom, and this was how he was able to follow Yvón’s puta’s progress through Italy, Portugal, and Spain. I was so beautiful in those days, she said wistfully. It was true—her smile could have put out a sun, but Oscar didn’t think she was any less fine now; the slight declensions in her appearance only seemed to add to her lustre and he told her so.

You’re so sweet, mi amor. She knocked back another double and rasped, What’s your sign?

How lovesick he became! He began to go over to her house nearly every day, even when he knew she was working, just in case she was sick or decided to quit the profession so she could marry him. The gates of his heart had swung open and he felt light on his feet, he felt weightless, he felt lithe. His moms steady gave him shit, told him that not even God loves a puta. Yeah, his tío laughed, but everybody knows that God loves a puto. His tío seemed thrilled that he no longer had a pájaro for a nephew. I can’t believe it, he said proudly. The palomo is finally a man. He put Oscar’s neck in the New Jersey State Police patented niggerkiller lock. When did it happen? What was the date? I want to play that número as soon I get home.

Here we go again: Oscar and Yvón at her house, Oscar and Yvón at the movies, Oscar and Yvón at the beach, Oscar and Yvón talking, voluminously. She told him about her two sons, Sterling and Perfecto, who lived with their grandparents in Puerto Rico, who she saw only on holidays. She told him about the two abortions she had, which she called Marisol and Pepita, and about the time she’d been jailed in Madrid and how hard it was to sell your ass, and asked, Can something be impossible and not impossible at once? She told him about her Dominican boyfriend, the Capitán, and her foreign boyfriends, the Italian, the German, and the Canadian, the three benditos, how they each visited her on different months. You’re lucky they all have families, she said, or I’d have been working this whole summer. (He wanted to ask her not to talk about any of these dudes, but she would only have laughed.)

Maybe we should get married, he said once, not joking, and she said, I make a terrible wife. He was around so often that he even got to see her in a couple of her notorious “moods,” when her alien princess took over and she became very cold and uncommunicative and called him an idiot americano for spilling his beer. On these days, she threw herself into bed and didn’t want to do anything. Hard to be around her, but he would convince her to see a movie and afterward she’d be a little easier. She’d take him to an Italian restaurant, and no matter how much her mood had improved she’d insist on drinking herself ridiculous—so bad he’d have to put her in the truck and drive her home through a city he did not know. (Early on, he hit on a great scheme: he called Clives, the evangelical taxista his family always used, who would swing by—no sweat—and lead him home.) When he drove, she always put her head in his lap and talked to him, sometimes in Italian, sometimes in Spanish, sometimes sweet, sometimes not, and having her mouth so close to his nuts was finer than your best yesterday.

Oh, they got close, all right, but we have to ask the hard questions: Did they ever kiss in her Pathfinder? Did he ever put his hands up her super-short skirt? Did she ever push up against him and say his name in a throaty whisper? Did they ever fuck?

Of course not. Miracles go only so far. He watched her for the signs that would tell him she loved him. He began to suspect that it might not happen this summer, but already he had plans to come back for Thanksgiving and then for Christmas. When he told her, she looked at him strangely and said only his name, Oscar, a little sadly.

She liked him, it was obvious. It seemed to Oscar that he was one of her few real friends. Outside the boyfriends, foreign and domestic, outside her psychiatrist sister in San Cristóbal and her ailing mother in Sabana Iglesia, her life seemed as spare as, say, her house.

Travel light, was all she ever said about the house when he suggested buying her a lamp or something, and he suspected that she would have said the same thing about having more friends. He knew, of course, that he wasn’t her only visitor. One day, he found three discarded condom foils on the floor and asked, Are you having trouble with incubuses? She smiled. This is one man who doesn’t know the word quit.

Poor Oscar. At night he dreamed that his rocket ship, the Hijo de Sacrificio, was up and off but that it was heading for the Ana Acuña Barrier at the speed of light.

OSCAR AT THE RUBICON

At the beginning of August, Yvón started mentioning her ex-boyfriend the Capitán a lot more. Seems he’d heard about Oscar and wanted to meet him. He’s really jealous, Yvón said, rather weakly. Just have him meet me, Oscar said. I make all boyfriends feel better about themselves. I don’t know, Yvón said. Maybe we shouldn’t spend so much time together. Shouldn’t you be looking for a girlfriend?

I got one, he said.

A jealous Third World cop ex-boyfriend? Maybe we shouldn’t spend so much time together? Any other nigger would have pulled a Scooby-Doo double take—Eeuoooorr?—would have thought twice about staying in Santo Domingo another day, but not Oscar.

Two days later, Oscar found his tío examining the front door. What’s the matter? His tío showed him the door and pointed at the concrete-block wall on the other side of the foyer. I think somebody shot our house last night. He shook his head. Fucking Dominicans. Probably hosed the whole neighborhood down.

For a second, Oscar felt this strange tugging in the back of his head, what someone else might have called Instinct, but instead of hunkering down and sifting through it he said, We probably didn’t hear it because of all our air-conditioners. Then he walked over to Yvón’s. They were going to the Duarte that day.

OSCAR GETS BEAT

In the middle of August, Oscar finally met the Capitán. Yvón had passed out again. It was super-late and he’d been following Clives in the Pathfinder, the usual routine, when a crowd of cops up ahead let Clives pass and then asked Oscar to please step out of the vehicle. These were the D.R.’s new highway police, brand-new uniforms and esprit de corps up to here. It’s not my truck, he explained, it’s hers. He pointed to sleeping Yvón. We understand. If you could please step out of the truck. It wasn’t until these two plainclothes—who we’ll call Solomon Grundy and Gorilla Grodd, for simplicity’s sake—tossed him into the back of a black Volkswagen bug that he realized something was up. Wait a minute, he said as they pulled out, where the hell are you taking me? Wait! Gorilla Grodd gave him one cold glance and that was all it took to quiet his ass down. This is fucked up, he said under his breath. I didn’t do nothing.

The Capitán was waiting for him on a noticeably unelectrified stretch of road. A skinny forty-something-year-old jabao standing near his spotless red Jeep, dressed nice in slacks and a crisply pressed white button-down, his shoes bright as scarabs. The Capitán was one of those tall, arrogant, handsome niggers that most of the planet feels inferior to. (The Capitán was also one of those very bad men who not even postmodernism can explain away.)

So you’re the New Yorker, he said with great cheer. When Oscar saw the Capitán’s close-set eyes he knew he was fucked. (He had the Eyes of Lee Van Cleef!) If it hadn’t been for the courage of his sphincter, Oscar’s lunch and his dinner and his breakfast would have whooshed straight out of him.

I didn’t do anything, Oscar quailed. Then he blurted out, I’m an American citizen.

The Capitán waved away a mosquito. I’m an American citizen, too. I was sworn in in the city of Buffalo, in the State of New York.

I bought mine in Miami, Gorilla Grodd said.

Not me, Solomon Grundy lamented. I only got my damn residency.

Please, you have to believe me, I didn’t do anything.

The Capitán smiled. Motherfucker even had First World teeth. Oscar was lucky; if he had looked like my pana Pedro, the Dominican Superman, he probably would have got shot right there. But because he was a young homely slob the Capitán punched him only a couple of times, warned him away from Yvón in no uncertain terms, and then remanded him to Messrs. Grundy and Grodd, who squeezed him back into the bug and drove out to the cane fields between Santo Domingo and Villa Mella.

Oscar was too scared to speak. He was a shook daddy. He couldn’t believe it. He was going to die. He tried to imagine Yvón at the funeral in her nearly see-through black sheath and couldn’t. Watched Santo Domingo race past and felt impossibly alone. Thought about his mother and his sister and started crying.

You need to keep it down, Grundy said, but Oscar couldn’t stop, even when he put his hands in his mouth.

At the cane fields, Messrs. Grodd and Grundy pulled Oscar out of the car, walked him into the cane, and then with their pistol butts proceeded to give him the beating to end all beatings. It was the Götterdämmerung of beatdowns, a beatdown so cruel and relentless that even Camden, the City of the Ultimate Beatdown, would have been impressed. (Yessir, nothing like getting smashed in the face with those patented Pachmayr Presentation Grips.) He shrieked, but that didn’t stop the beating; he begged, but that didn’t stop it, either; he blacked out, but that was no relief; the niggers kicked him in the nuts and perked him right up! It was like one of those nightmare 8 A.M.M.L.A. panels that you think will never, ever end. Man, Gorilla Grodd said, this kid is making me sweat. Toward the end, Oscar found himself thinking about his old dead abuela, who used to scratch his back and fry him yaniqueques; she was sitting in her rocking chair and when she saw him she snarled, What did I tell you about those putas?

The only reason he didn’t lie out in that rustling endless cane for the rest of his life was because Clives the evangelical taxista had had the guts to follow the cops on the sly, and when they broke out he turned on his headlights and pulled up to where they’d last been and found poor Oscar. Are you alive? Clives whispered. Oscar said, Blub, blub. Clives couldn’t hoist Oscar into the car alone so he drove to a nearby batey and recruited a couple of Haitian braceros to help him. This is a big one, one of the braceros joked. The only thing Oscar said the whole ride back was her name. Yvón. Broken nose, broken zygomatic arch, crushed seventh cranial nerve, three of his front teeth snapped off at the gum, concussion, alive.

That was the end of it. When Moms de León heard it was the police, she called first a doctor and then the airlines. She wasn’t no fool; she’d lived through Trujillo and the Devil Balaguer; knew that the cops hadn’t forgotten shit from those days. She put it in the simplest of terms. You stupid, worthless, no-good son of a whore are going home. No, he said, through demolished lips. He wasn’t fooling, either. When he first woke up and realized that he was still alive, he insisted on seeing Yvón. I love her, he whispered, and his mother said, Shut up, you! Just shut up!

The doctor ruled out epidural hematoma but couldn’t guarantee that Oscar didn’t have brain damage. (She was a cop’s girlfriend? Tío Rodolfo whistled. I’ll vouch for the brain damage.) Send him home right now, homegirl said, but for four whole days Oscar resisted any attempt to be packed up in a plane, which says a lot about this fat kid’s fortitude; he was eating morphine by the handful and his grill was in agony, he had an around-the-clock quadruple migraine and couldn’t see squat out of his right eye; motherfucker’s head was so swollen he looked like John Merrick, Jr., and anytime he attempted to stand, the ground whisked right out from under him. My God! he thought. So this is what it feels like to get your ass kicked. It wasn’t all bad, though; the beating granted him strange insights: he heard his tío, three rooms over, stealing money from his mother’s purse; and he realized that had he and Yvón not been serious the Capitán would probably never have fucked with him. Proof positive that he and Yvón had a relationship.

Yvón didn’t answer her cell, and the few times Oscar managed to limp to the window he saw that her Pathfinder wasn’t there. I love you, he shouted into the street. I love you! Once, he made it to her door and buzzed before his tío realized that he was gone and dragged him back inside.

And, then, on Day Three, she came. While she sat on the edge of his bed, his mother banged pots in the kitchen and said “puta” loudly enough for them to hear.

Forgive me if I don’t get up, Oscar whispered. I’m having a little trouble with my face.

She was dressed in white, like an angel, and her hair was still wet from the shower, a tumult of brownish curls. Of course the Capitán had beaten the shit out of her, too; of course she had two black eyes. (He’d also put his .44 Magnum in her vagina and asked her who she really loved.) There was nothing about her that Oscar wouldn’t have gladly kissed. She put her fingers on his hand and told him that she could never be with him again. For some reason, Oscar couldn’t see her face; it was a blur, she had retreated completely into that other plane of hers. Heard only the sorrow of her breathing. He tried to focus but all he saw was his love for her. Yvón? he croaked, but she was already gone.

Se acabó. Oscar refused to look at the ocean as they drove to the airport. It’s beautiful today, Clives remarked. On the flight over, Oscar sat between his tío and his moms. Jesus, Oscar, Rodolfo said nervously. You look like they put a shirt on a turd.

P-TOWN BLUES

Oscar returned to Paterson. He lay in bed, he stared at his games, he read Andre Norton books, he healed. He talked to the school, and they told him not to worry about the job; it was his when he was ready. You’re lucky you’re alive, his mother told him. Maybe you could save up your money and get an operation for your face, his tío suggested. Oscar, his sister sighed, Oscar. On the darkest days, he sat in his tío’s closet, the Dragoon on his lap, looked back over the past two decades of his life, saw nothing but cowardice and fear. So why was there still a fortress in his heart? Why did he feel like he could be Minas Tirith if he wanted to? He really tried to forget, but he couldn’t. He dreamed that he was adrift, alone in his spacesuit, and that she was calling to him.

Me and Lola were living up in the Heights—this was before the white kids started their invasion, when you could walk the entire length of Harlem and see not a single “homesteader.” September, October? I was home for the week, curling ninety, when Oscar buzzed me from the street. Hadn’t seen him in weeks. Jesus, Oscar, I said. Come up, come up. I waited for him in the hall and when he stepped out of the elevator I put the mitts on him. How are you, bro?

I’m fine, he said, smiling sheepishly.

We sat down and I broke up a dutch, asked him how it was going.

I’m going back to Don Bosco soon.

Word? I said.

Word, he said. His face was still fucked up, the left side was paralyzed and wouldn’t get better anytime soon, but he wasn’t hiding it anymore. I still got the Two-Face going on bad, he said, laughing.

You gonna smoke?

Just a little. I don’t want to cloud my faculties.

That last day on our couch, he looked like a man at peace with himself. You should have seen him. He was so thin, had lost all the weight, and was still, still.

I want to know, Yunior, if you can do me a favor.

Anything, bro. Just ask it.

He needed money for a security deposit, was finally moving into his own apartment, and of course I gave it to him. All I had, but if anybody was going to pay me back it was Oscar.

We smoked the dutch and talked about the problems me and Lola were having.

You should never have had carnal relations with that Paraguayan girl, he pointed out.

I know, I said, I know. He seemed confident that it would work itself out, though, and there was something in his tone that made me hopeful. You ain’t going to wait for Lola?

Have to get back to Paterson. I got a date.

You’re shitting me?

He shook his head, the tricky fuck.

On Saturday, he was gone.

THE LAST DAYS

As soon as he hit the airport exit, Oscar called Clives and homeboy picked him up an hour later. Cristiano, Clives said, eyes tearing, what are you doing here?

It’s the Ancient Powers, Oscar said. They won’t leave me alone.

They parked in front of her house and waited almost seven hours before she returned. Pulled up in the Pathfinder. She looked thinner. For a moment, he thought about letting the whole thing go, returning to Bosco and getting on with his life, but then she stooped over to pick up her gym bag, as if the whole world were watching, and that settled it. He winched down the window and called her name. She stopped, shaded her eyes, and then recognized him. She said his name, terrified. Oscar. He popped the door and walked over to where she was standing and embraced her and she said, Mi amor, you have to leave right now.

In the middle of the street, he told her how it was. He was in love with her. He’d been hurt, but now he was all right, and if he could just have a week alone with her, one short week, then everything would be fine, and he would be able to go on with his life, and he said it again, that he loved her more than the universe, and it wasn’t something that he could shake, so, please, come away with him for a little while, and then it would be over if she wanted.

Maybe she did love him a little bit. Maybe in her heart of hearts she left the gym bag on the concrete and got in the taxi with him. But she’d known men like the Capitán all her life. Knew, also, that in the D.R. they called a bullet a cop’s divorce. The gym bag was not left on the street.

I’m going to call him, Oscar, she said, misting up a little. So, please, go, before he gets here.

I’m not going anywhere, he said.

For twenty-seven days he chased her. He sat in front of her house, he called her on her cell, he went to the World Famous Riverside, a casa de putas where she worked. The neighbors, when they saw him on the curb, shook their heads and said, Look at that loco.

She was miserable when she saw him and miserable, she would tell him later, when she didn’t, convinced that he’d been killed. He slipped long passionate letters under her gate, written in English, and the only response he got was when the Capitán and his friends called and threatened to chop him in pieces. After each threat, he recorded the time and then phoned the Embassy and told them that the Capitán had threatened to kill him, and asked, Could you please help?

She started scribbling back notes and passed them to him at the club or had them mailed to his house. Please, Oscar, I haven’t slept in a week. I don’t want you to end up hurt or dead. Go home.

But, beautiful girl above all beautiful girls, he wrote back. This is my home.

Your real home, mi amor.

A person can’t have two?

Night Nineteen, she honked her horn, and he opened his eyes and knew it was her. She leaned over and unlocked the truck door, and when he got in he tried to kiss her, but she said, Please stop it. They drove out toward La Romana, where the Capitán didn’t have no friends. Nothing new was discussed, but he said, I like your new haircut, and she started laughing and crying and said, Really? You don’t think it makes me look cheap?

You and cheap do not compute, Yvón.

What could we do? Lola flew down to see him, begged him to come home, told him that he was only going to get Yvón and himself killed; he listened and then said angrily that she didn’t understand how he felt, never had. How incredibly short are twenty-seven days.

One night, the Capitán and his friends came into the Riverside, and Oscar stared at the man for a good ten seconds and then, whole body shaking, he left. Didn’t bother to call Clives, jumped in the first taxi he could find. The next night Oscar was back and, in the parking lot of the Riverside, he tried again to kiss Yvón; she turned her head away (but not her body). Please don’t, she said. He’ll kill us.

Twenty-seven days, and then the expected happened. One night, he and Clives were driving back from the World Famous Riverside and at a light two men got into the cab with them. It was, of course, Gorilla Grodd and Solomon Grundy. Good to see you again, Grodd said, and then they beat him as best they could, given the limited space inside the cab.

This time, Oscar didn’t cry when they drove him back to the cane fields. Zafra would be here soon, and the cane had grown well and thick and in places you could hear the stalks clack-clack-clacking against each other like triffids, and you could hear the kriyol voices lost in the night. There was a moon, and Clives begged the men to spare Oscar, but they laughed. You should be worrying, Grodd said, about yourself. Oscar sent telepathic messages to his moms (I love you, Señora), to Rodolfo (Quit, Tío, and live), to Lola (I’m so sorry it happened; I always loved you), and the longest to Yvón.

They walked him into the cane and then turned him around. (Clives they left tied up in the cab.) They looked at him and he looked at them, and then he started to speak. He told them that what they were doing was wrong, that they were going to take a great love out of the world. Love was a rare thing, he told them, easily confused with a million other things, and if anybody knew this to be true it was him. He told them about Yvón and the way he loved her and how much they had risked and that they’d started to dream the same dreams and say the same words, and he told them that if they killed him they would probably feel nothing and their children would probably feel nothing, either, not until they were old and weak or about to be struck by a car, and then they would sense his waiting for them on the other side, and over there he wouldn’t be no fat boy or dork or kid no girl had ever loved, over there he’d be a hero, an avenger. Because anything you can dream (he put his hand up) you can be.

They waited for him to finish, and then they shot him to pieces.

Oscar—

THE END OF THE STORY

Lola and I flew down to claim the body. We went to the funeral. A year later, we broke up.

Four times, the family hired lawyers, but no charges were ever filed. The Embassy didn’t help and neither did the government. Yvón, I hear, is still living in Mirador Norte, still dancing at the Riverside. The de Leóns sold their house a year later.

Lola swore she would never return to that terrible country, and I don’t think she ever has. On one of our last nights, she said, Eight million Trujillos is all we are.

(Of course things like this don’t happen in Santo Domingo no more. We have enlightened, uncorrupt politicians and a kind benevolent President and a people who are clearheaded and loving. The country is kind, no Haitian or dark-skinned person is hated, the élites fuck nobody, and the police measure their probity by the mile.)

Almost eight weeks after Oscar died, a package arrived at the house in Paterson. Two manuscripts enclosed. One was chapters of his never-to-be-completed opus, an E. E. (Doc) Smithesque space opera called “Starscourge.” The other was a long letter to Lola. Turns out that toward the end the palomo did get Yvón away from the capital. For two whole days, they hid out on some beach in Barahona while the Capitán was away on “business,” and guess what? Yvón actually kissed him! Guess what else? Yvón actually fucked him. Yahoo! He reported that he’d liked it and that Yvón’s you-know-what hadn’t tasted the way he had expected. She tastes like Heineken, he said. He wrote that at night Yvón had nightmares that the Capitán had found them; once, she’d woken up and said in the voice of true fear, Oscar, he’s here, really believing he was, and Oscar woke up and threw himself at the Capitán but it turned out to be only a turtle shell the hotel had hung on the wall for decoration. Almost busted my nose! He wrote that Yvón had little hairs coming up almost to her bellybutton and that she crossed her eyes when she fucked but what really got him were the little intimacies that he’d never in his whole life anticipated, like combing her hair or getting her underwear off a line or watching her walk naked to the bathroom or the way she would suddenly sit on his lap and put her face into his neck. The intimacies like listening to her tell him about being a little girl and him telling her that he’d been a virgin all his life. He wrote that he couldn’t believe he’d had to wait for this so goddam long. (Yvón was the one who suggested calling the wait something else. Yeah, like what? Maybe, she said, you could call it life.) He wrote: So this is what everybody’s always talking about! Diablo! If only I’d known. The beauty! The beauty! ♦

Junot Díaz was named one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” in 1999 and has regularly contributed both fiction and nonfiction since 1995.